NORTHAMPTON zoos the 22nd Annual Northampton Pride March May 3rd, 2003 Starts at 12 noon at the Bridge Street School in Northampton, MA and goes through town to the Veterans Field. Rally tram 1-«tpm Speeches 0 Musical Performers - comedy 9 Drag Show For Information about advertising, sponsorship. and vendor tables Call 413.586.5682 or 1.877.7¢3.3627 or email at im‘0@no:tharuptonprideorg Susan.McKenzie MS. Jungian Psychoanalyst Licensed Psychologist - Master Specializing in issues of Gay,‘ Lesbian, Bi-sexual and Transgendered individuals and couples Quechee — White River Junction (802) 295-5533 Insurance Accepted Because our team as dedicated to providing the best possible service to all peopie, we are proud of our ties to the GLBT community. Specializing in Addison County Georggfugrewer v www.Iangteam.net Jennifer Ponder _ REALTOR, CR5. GR}. CR8. ABR (802) 388 1000 MPH s Orm volunteer £angmiddIi_?/sover.nct jennponder@hotmaiI.com ’ IT’S ABOUT TIME WE GOT S TESTED. .. WALK IN ORAL HIV TESTING FREE, ANONYMOUS, N0 NEEDLES 27 SOUTH MAIN ST. RUTLAND 802775-5884 WEDNESDAYS I235 Hos1>rrAL DR., SUrrE 3 ST. IOHNSBURY 802-748-9061 10AM-IBM WEDNESDAY 3-6PM, 361 PEARL ST. BURLINGTON 802-863-2437 MONDAYS 4PM-7PM 39 BARRE ST. SUTTE I IVIONTPELIER 802-229-4560 TUESDAY MAY 27TH IPM-4PM BY Kntsrm Perm ecently I spoke to‘ Kim Bent of Lost Nation Theater, ontpelier, to check on the status of the up-coming production of The Children is Hour, a 1934 drama that not only initiated controversy — and a healthy long run — but also was the start of a long-run career for the playwright herself, Lillian Hellman (1906-1984). Bent says auditions resulted in solid yet intriguing casting, thanks in large part to the jolt the play’s bound to receive from talented stu- dents, high-schoolers who in March were concluding their workshop expe- rience with Janice Perry (who will be playing Martha, the eventually suici- dal schoolmistress), one of the faculty in LNT’s Conservatory, a workshop for kids really interested in in-depth theatre work (see the April issue of OITM or call LNT at 802-229-0492 or email info@lostnationtheater.org). Although the play is of Depression vintage, the Lost Nation Theater’s presentation of The Children ’s Hour will still grip audi- ences today with its crushing blitzkrieg of lies and innuendo against the lives of two young women, head- mistresses of a private New England girls’ school, as they suffer the alter- math of having been cried outagainst as “unnatural,” malevolent influences on the lives of the very girls they should be safe-guarding. I remember reading Hellman’s play one summer between my junior and senior year in high school, and thinking that, like Miller’s play The Crucible or Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter — both about the results of cruel, self-serving, hys- terical accusations — The Children’s Hour, too, gives us a sense of devas- tating human destruction moving with such speed and force that the worthi- est and most stalwart among us never can win, not immediately, anyway, and not in any way that truncated, fearful minds and spirits will ever acknowledge, or even recognize, when they see it. I remember sitting alone in the Miracle Theatre on Miracle Mile, Coral Gables, in the smoking lounge at a weird time of day watching The Children 3 Hour — the 1962 film ver- sion — two times. I doubt if I was 20. Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine were the besieged head- mistresses, while James Garner added the beefcake as Audrey’s boyfriend. I hadn’t remembered who played that demon-from-hell student (Mary Tilford, played in the film by Karen Balkin, and in Montpelier by Dayna Cousins) who overheard a con- versation about the “unnaturalness” of the headmistresses’ relationship with one another. She then whispered the gossip to her grandmother, knowing full well that it would ruin her teach- ers and the prep school they worked so hard to establish. At the time the film was overwrought, I kept telling myself, too darkly calarnitous. But that was because I was too scared even to invite friends to see it with me. I would have written ‘straight friends,’ but in those days they were ‘them,’ and my budding gay identity was carefully hidden away like a beloved pet I had been told to kill. And I took a certain level of comfort in the fact that Hepburn and Janice Perry and Lost Nation Theatre's Conservatory Students Lost Nation Theatre Mouts production of Lillian HeI|man’s The Children’s Hour MacLaine actually took the roles, played the parts. I mean, they must have at least compassion for the suf- fering teachers and real distainfor those frightened bigots who allowed a spoiled child to break decent peoples’ lives. In college, my professors treated Hellman in an offhand manner and revealed they didn’t like her much at all. She was, in fact, a fraud. She was a Stalin-lover, they all but said. She was unlovely, she drank like a fish and social-climbed and couldn’t hold a candle to Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Mary McCarthy. She slept around, and with- out (first husband and play producer Arthur Kober and Dashiell Hammett and director William Wyler, where would she be? And there were insinu- ations about her relationship with a woman or two. Even so, I admired her. I could well imagine what she had been up against, and I didn’t begrudge her the booze, her treachery, even her lies. I felt that, if she were indeed a user, ,she got as good as she gave. 1 had no idea, of course, what she thought of lesbians, especial- ly if she sort of was one. In fact, she said The Children is Hour wasn’t about lesbians at all, it was about “the power of a lie.” There was a truth in the play that spoke, at least to me, about the possibility of dignity in the face of disaster and the hope that a way for- ward for the precious you you’ve always been hiding can be found. A friend of mine wondered to me if, in rehearsing and presenting plays like this to better keep alive our history, on the one hand, how can we avoid giving “them” more reasons to hate us, to discriminate against us? I think I just don’t care so much about their hatred anymore. It is, to me, a lesser thing, paler and even pathetic, silhouetted against the greater thing that is the very real diminishment of our hatred toward ourselves. In the New York Times, Sunday, April 13, 2003, M. J. Gross wrote about Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, “documentary filmmakers who have been partners in business and in life” for about 21 years. Sometime during the week of April I4, their latest production School ’s Out: The Life of a Gay High School in Texas was shown as part of MTV’s True Life documentary series. I missed it, but l’ll find it down the line, I hope. I know about high schools, and sitting in mine so long ago I never could have imagined a school like this. And the very horror of the schools like the one in The Children 5 Hour will give one pause and a quiet thanks will be felt that, even amidst present pain and hatred, beacons exist and no teacher attacked will ever again feel such aloneness. Lillian Hellman. working from a true story suggested to her by Dashiell Hammett about two “old maid schoolteachers” in the Scotland of 1810 and what happened when they were accused of lesbianism, took that kernel and made up a story. She fash- ioned it so that it was — and is — true. Most of us, straight or gay, will feel the truth when we see it on stage in Montpelier. ‘ And though she never wrot it down in the script, I think Hellman was fashioning the beginning ofa world — perhaps glimpsed primarily through the character Karen, at the play’s end — that can become more real. I’ve never seen this play performed on stage. A script read alone or, perhaps in a classroom, doesn’t begin to touch what the imag inings and energy of a talented ensen ble of actors can do for Miss Hellman’s electric words. She’d be tl first to admit that a script is merely a guideline. The play’s not the thing. It takes the actors for it to come alive and render the truth. V Kristin Pettit is a semi-retired Englis teacher and drama coach who lives I Underhill with her partner. The Children’s Hour will run May 15- June I, Thursdays through Sundays. Tickets purchased through Mountain Pride Media for the Sunday, May [8 performance will benefit MPM. For benefit tickets, call or email Roland 802-383-7679 (days) or rfpvt@togel er.net. For other tickets, call Lost Nation Theater at 229-0492.